autonomous dj collective

ah, the humanity

lefty:  i care so much about humanity that i'm willing to impede growth to provide greater resources now to some people with less.

righty:  i care so much about humanity that i'm willing to leave some people with less so that we don't impede growth.

happiness

yet another reason to be skeptical of (i) attempts to base policy on what some people think should make others happy and (ii) philosophical analysis based on extrapolation from introspection:

the fact that the happiness-effects of various things seem to be mediated by ideological leanings seems to basically ruin the prospect of using happiness research as a neutral, scientific way of assessing policy. It may just end up sort-of-usefully reminding us that one group may like a certain policy and another group may not simply because it makes one group feel better and another group feel worse. It doesn’t settle the dispute: it explains why we’re having it. Also, ideological mediation is one more nail in the coffin for the introspective method of normative philosophy. If the effects of this or that on people’s sense of well-being is mediated by their ideological cast, then chances are, our intuitions about real and hypothetical cases are probably already deeply infected with our ideological notions–or with the personality traits that lead us to find those notions attractive–and arguments based on these intuitions simply beg all the interesting questions in a subtle way.

chimps

good explanation for why i dislike politics so much (and don't understand those who don't):

I wish to protest our excessive tendency to choose sides with one group of people rather than another.  I wish to protest excess partisanship, and in particular excess partisanship motivated by the construction of "imaginary good" and "imaginary bad" political personalities.

As biological creatures we are programmed to respond to faces, voices, names, and identities.  We praise them, follow them, condemn them, figure out what side they are on, just like good ol' East African Plains Apes.  Who is not excited to see a President of the United States attending a Wizards game in a nearby box?  I know I was, and I didn't even vote for him.  Chimps will give up bananas, just to be able to gaze at photos of high-status other chimps.

eating animals

this seems right to me, and one of those things we will ultimately come to accept as given or obvious (people in the future will be hard pressed to understand how otherwise moral people were willing to treat livestock the way we do):

I have nothing against eating animals per se, even live ones, but I think it is immoral to eat animals raised under awful conditions, such as factory farming.

webb on vietnam

this perhaps falls under the general heading of being wrong about communism, though the commonly accepted version of the story is also just wrong re many basic facts.

irrationality re politics

why i don't like "discussing" political issues, which i view as little more than a form of political theatre:

Perhaps the most striking feature of the subject of politics is how prone it is to disagreement—only religion and morality rival politics as a source of disagreement. There are three main features of political disagreements I want to point out: (i) They are very widespread. It isn’t just a few people disagreeing about a few issues; rather, any two randomly-chosen people are likely to disagree about many political issues. (ii) They are strong, that is, the disagreeing parties are typically very convinced of their own positions, not at all tentative. (iii) They are persistent, that is, it is extremely difficult to resolve them. Several hours’ of argumentation typically fails to resolve political disputes. Some have gone on for decades (either with the same principals or with different parties over multiple generations).

This should strike us as very odd. Most other subjects—for instance, geology, or linguistics, or algebra—are not subject to disagreements at all like this; their disputes are far fewer in number and take place against a backdrop of substantial agreement in basic theory; and they tend to be more tentative and more easily resolved. Why is politics subject to such widespread, strong, and persistent disagreements?

The best explanation is provided by the hypothesis that most people are irrational about politics and not, for example, that political issues are particularly difficult or that we lack sufficient evidence for resolving them.

fighting for control of culture

a possible way to reconcile so-called contemporary "liberalism" and libertarianism?  regardless, thomas nagel suggests a reason not to support PCist thinking:

My claim has been that liberals should not be fighting for control of the culture -- that they should embrace a form of cultural restraint comparable to that which governs the liberal attitude to law, and that this is the largest conception of the value of privacy.  No one should be in control of the culture, and the persistence of private racism, sexism, homophobia, religious and ethnic bigotry, sexual puritanism, and other such private pleasures should not provoke liberals to demand constant public affirmation of the opposite values.  The important battles are about how people are required to treat each other, how social and economic institutions are to be arranged, and how public resources are to be used.  The insistence on securing more agreement in attitudes than we need for these purposes, and on including more of the inner life in the purview of even informal public authority, just raises the social stakes unnecessarily.

faith

why do people so often assume bad faith where doing so is counterproductive?  is posturing that much fun?

What would the past five years have been like, I couldn't help wondering, if debate and criticism had proceeded atop the civil platform of agreement that the President was really trying to do his best in a terrible crisis that almost no one had anticipated? Imagine that everyone had been sober and serious all along, as if the responsibility were theirs and not someone else's. Imagine that the opposition to the administration's policies had been more substantive than personal, focused on alternative proposals rather than autopsies of irrevocable decisions past. Imagine that all of us were dealing with today's reality instead of pet grievances from months or years ago. Isn't it possible that the critics might have had more impact on events, that the defenders of American policy might have listened and responded more thoughtfully?

tolerance

if you've wondered why a left that reveres tolerance would rally to support the ridiculously intolerant:

In theory, if you’d wanted to construct an enemy least likely to appeal to the progressive Left, wife-beating gay-bashing theocrats would surely be it. But Islamism turned out to be the ne plus ultra of multiculti diversity-celebration — for what more demonstrates the boundlessness of one’s “tolerance” than by tolerating the intolerant.

empiricals

interesting article on how empiricism will change policy; i want a new political party -- the empricists or somesuch -- that will reject the religious, faith-based positions of both the left and right, ignoring for now that facts can't generate values.

It remains the case that if supporters of a policy can demonstrate that it leads to greater prosperity, the political battle is often half-won. It is true that facts alone cannot generate values, and thus no empirical evidence by itself can logically mandate support for a specific social policy. Smith’s contemporary, the philosopher David Hume, himself made this clear with his famous “is-ought distinction.” But politically, most people within modern industrial society adhere to a rather narrow range of values, at least in the economic realm. They favor more prosperity, better education and health care, and other such goods that make for a flourishing life. As to these issues, what is debated is which political program will in fact broadly deliver these goods.